Practice Transformation

Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL) is a collaborative-driven, practice change network tailored to the unique environment of emergency medicine. It is designed to achieve higher quality patient outcomes at lower cost by creating and accumulating meaningful tools targeted at emergency clinicians and quality improvement leaders to advance local quality improvement efforts focused on high-impact areas that demonstrate the value of emergency care: improving sepsis outcomes, reducing avoidable imaging, reducing chest pain hospitalizations, reducing harm from opioids.

EDs participate in an E-QUAL initiative by joining a learning collaborative offered annually focusing on a single clinical topic. Each learning collaborative has a 9-month learning period in which the ED champion interacts with the virtual E-QUAL portal and report on local quality improvement activities. Activities include engaging eligible providers in the QI local project, providing access to educational toolkits, webinars, podcasts, benchmarking data, and self-assessment tools.

Through E-QUAL, ACEP has brought practice transformation to the emergency medicine community through widespread implementation of E-QUAL learning collaboratives. To date over 1,800 EDs and over 39,000 emergency medical providers have participated in E-QUAL collaboratives.

E-QUAL learning collaboratives have resulted in more efficient and better care and better outcomes for patients, including:

• 25,000 lives saved from better sepsis care
• $55,000,000 saved from fewer avoidable imaging studies and hospitalizations
• 30,000 fewer patients harmed by ionizing radiation
• 6,000 Improvement Activity credits were earned for the CMS Quality Payment Program
• Steady increase in emergency clinician practice readiness for alternative payment models

For more information on E-QUAL and how to enroll into a 2020 Learning Collaborative, contact the E-QUAL Team.